I was standing at the door of her tomb!

I did not question. I knew, I comprehended.

In no other way could I have found such calm.

Though I flung myself on the shining marble steps that led in the
moonlight up to the top of the knoll where the tomb stood, I had no
tears to shed.

The present floated still further away.

Even the rush of the torrent died out of my ears.

Once more it seemed to me that lovely day in May when we three had
marched, shoulder to shoulder, down the city street--that spring day
in the early sixties, when the North was sending her flower to fight
for a united country.

Again I felt the warm sunshine on my head.

Once more I heard the ringing cheers, saw the floating flags, and the
faces of women who wept as well as women who smiled in the throngs
that lined the street.

Just as in all my life it had been his emotions and his enthusiasms
that led me, it was his excitement that impelled me forward at this
moment. His was the hand that in my school days, at college, in our
Bohemian days abroad, had swept my responsive nature as a master hand
strikes a harp, and made harmonies or discords at his will--or, I
should say, according to his mood.

I used to think in those days that he never willfully wronged any one,
but I had to own also that he never deliberately sacrificed himself
for any one. And, if I were the victim of his temperament, he was no
less so. But he was an artist. I was not. All things either good or
bad were merely material to him. With me it was different.

He and I were alone in the world. But beside us marched, that May
morning, with the glory of youth on his handsome but weak face, one
whose "baptism of fire" was to make him a hero, who had else been
remembered a coward.

The story of the girl he had wronged, and fear of whom had even
reconciled his family to his enlisting, was common property, and had
been for several seasons. There was a child, too, a little daughter,
fondly loved, but unacknowledged, the fame of whose childish beauty
many a heedless voice had already sung.

He, poor youngster, looked on his all that morning.

Once more I saw the flag draped house where his mother waved a brave
farewell to him.

But there was another later picture in my mind. Again I heard the
blare of the band before us as it flung its satire of "The Girl I Left
Behind Me," into the spring air. I saw once more in my mind the child,
with her floating red gold curls, raised